#909 6/25/18 – This Week: Critiquing “Occupied Palestinian Territories” – How Far We Still Have To Go in Articulating the Jewish Homeland Case

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  This coming week, a British royal will visit “Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” a British-stated itinerary characterization deemed biased not just by rightwing Israelis.  But some of the critics didn’t go far enough in correcting the biased language.  Come see. 

This Week:  Critiquing “Occupied Palestinian Territories” – How Far We Still Have To Go In Articulating the Jewish Homeland Case

Great Britain last week released a detailed itinerary of Prince William’s visit next week to “Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”  Although British royals have visited in “private” capacities, this is a royal’s first “official” visit to Israel.  The official itinerary doesn’t expressly call Jerusalem’s Old City part of those “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” but it expressly puts the Mount of Olives there and at least implies that’s where the Old City lies.  After detailing the Prince’s visits to sites in Jordan and Israel, the detailed itinerary continues:

     “The next day’s programme in the Occupied Palestinian Territories will begin with a short briefing on the history and geography of Jerusalem’s Old City from a viewing point at the Mount of Olives.”

In a Council on Foreign Relations blog posting, Elliott Abrams put it this way:

     “This episode has made me agree entirely with David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, that the United States should stop using the term ‘occupied territory’ to describe any part of Jerusalem or the West Bank. Call it ‘disputed territory,’ which it certainly is, or just say ‘East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Palestinians claim as part of an eventual Palestinian state.’ Legally, it is hard to see how land that was once Ottoman, then governed by Britain under a League of Nations mandate, then Jordanian, can be ‘Occupied Palestinian territory’ anyway.”

I’d go still further in five respects:

[1]  Don’t say “east Jerusalem,” and especially not capital-E “East Jerusalem”:  The 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement drew a military ceasefire line – expressly declared not to be a political border – through western Palestine, including the city of Jerusalem, based solely on where the Israeli and invading Jordanian armies then stood, not along any pre-existing political lines.  That 1949 military ceasefire line was obliterated by renewed 1967 fighting between the same sides.  Calling, in 2018, that part of the city that had never in history been differentiated as a separate part before CE 1948 and ceased to have separate rule 19 years later, more than a half-century ago, “east Jerusalem,” let alone capital-E “East Jerusalem,” resurrects the ghost of that long-gone fleeting Jordanian occupation to rip that part of what had been an undivided unified city for thousands of years from its strongest historically and demographically claiming indigenous owner, the Jews.

[2]  Don’t say “West Bank”:  “West Bank,” like “East Jerusalem,” was conjured in the mid-twentieth century for the same reason that in the mid-second century the Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine,” to replace what had been a time-honored Jewish name – in “the West Bank’s” case “Judea-Samaria,” millennia-used Hebrew-origin names, used by the U.N. itself in 1947 – with a non-Jewish name.

[3]  Don’t call Palestinian Arabs “The Palestinians”:  The name of that League of Nations mandate referenced by Mr. Abrams in the above quote was “the Palestine Mandate.”  At the time of that Mandate’s attempted second partition in 1947 (almost 80% having been previously lopped off as all-Arab Transjordan), the remaining cis-Jordan population was c. a million Arabs and some 600,000 Jews, all called “Palestinians” (a name invented by Rome in the second century to disassociate what had been Judaea from Jews), with its Jews calling themselves that more than did its Arabs.  Jews had lived there, as Jews, since the late second millennium BCE, Christians from the first century CE, and Muslims from the seventh century CE.  It is senseless, to say no more, for Jews gratuitously to concede to Muslim Arabs the exclusive mantle of “The Palestinians.”

[4]  Don’t refer to a claimed future second Palestinian Arab state as “an eventual Palestinian state”:   Reference to “an eventual Palestinian state” suggests that there is no existing “Palestinian” state.  The majority population of the Arab state Jordan, carved from the original Palestine Mandate, classifies itself as “Palestinian.”  Jews are reticent to make this argument, given that as Israel’s neighboring Arab states go, relatively pro-western Hashemite-ruled Jordan, having a peace treaty like Egypt with Israel, is less at least overtly seeking Israel’s destruction than some.  But majority-Palestinian Arab-ruled or not, a state carved out of some 78% of the Palestine Mandate with a Palestinian Arab population majority is in fact “a Palestinian state.”  Creating a second Palestinian Arab majority (or Arab exclusively) state from what is left of the Palestine Mandate, shrinking the Jewish (Arab minority) Palestinian state to 9-miles-wide in the lowland middle would render it not a defensible state but a ghetto (a name, btw, originated with reference to us).

[5]  Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem were never “Jordanian”:  We shouldn’t concede that the land of Israel’s hill country heartland and heart of its Jerusalem capital were ever “Jordanian.”  Transjordan (along with Egypt, Syria, Lebanon et al) invaded western Palestine, the land of Israel, when the Jewish homeland re-declared its independence in 1948, and the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement created not a border but a military ceasefire line that lasted until 1967, when Israel pushed Jordan back over the Jordan.  If ever there were a case of “Occupation” by a foreign nation with zero prior historical connection to a place, the Jordanian occupation of Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem for a fleeting nineteen years in the mid-twentieth century was it.  “Jordanian,” indeed.